1. Technical Field of the Invention
This invention relates to web technology. More particularly, it relates to the creation and use of collaboration sites on the Internet or on an intranet client/server system and to the graphical user interface used in Internet communications.
2. Background Art
The Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) provide intra-enterprise connectivity, inter-enterprise connectivity and application hosting on a larger scale than ever before. By exploiting the broadly available and deployed standards of the Internet and the WWW, system users and designers can leverage a single architecture to build client/server applications for internal use that can reach outside to customers, business partners and suppliers.
Collaboration requires simultaneous communication between individuals on a project team. Typically, this has required that the team members work in the same location. Phone and video conferencing has enabled some remote work on the part of team members. Also, because of the growth of the Internet, collaboration using web technologies has been attempted, primarily using electronic mail (E-mail), Internet chat rooms, electronic whiteboards, and conferencing software. The most useful has been E-mail, but this approach results in a large trail or thread of notes as collaboration on a project advances, and these notes have no home or place to reside which is accessible by all team members substantially instantaneously and simultaneously. People often enter such a thread at different points, and such threads are not efficient in coordinating the work of many different people on a team which may include in-house developers and others, such as remote contractors, outside of an enterprise""s firewall.
In order for such disperse teams to have the same, or substantially the same, collaboration environment as individuals working in the same physical office, a system is required which facilitates instant messaging, voice conferencing, electronic white boarding, and text and non-text file exchange. Such a system needs to provide a collaborative electronic room, or space, which is easily configured for use by team members without substantial administrative or application development support, and preferably include both groupware and project oriented applications such as shared folders, file exchange, workflow, group calendars, threaded conversations, version control, file locking, file merging, and security.
There is a need in the art for such a system which is easy to set up and which enables diverse and remote teams to become immediately productive in a secure environment. It would be, further, most desirable to allow such a collaborative environment to be set up without administrative support, that is by members of the team itself, using a familiar and easy to use browser user interface. Members of the team, acting with manager or author authority, and using such a browser interface without involving administrative or application development support, need to be able to set up a folder or room for each project element, such as a source code component, with version control, workflow elements, and group calendaring for tracking the project or project element with respect to approvals and deadlines. Such a room needs to receive from team members reports and have them routed to appropriate team members for review, resolution, and approval.
FIG. 1 shows a commonly used network arrangement in which a plurality of local computer systems 101-104 in a local area network (LAN) may access a plurality of remote servers 105-108 through the Internet 100. Each remote server may be a web server (such as a Domino (TM) web server, available from Lotus Development Corporation of Cambridge, Mass.) for providing a web site for access by local computer systems 101-104. Each web site normally further provides a plurality of web pages to be served to the local computer systems upon request. Each local computer system may access the remote web sites with web browser software.
The WWW is a collection of servers on an IP (Internet Protocol) network, such as the Internet, an Intranet or an Extranet, that utilize the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Hereinafter, xe2x80x9cInternetxe2x80x9d 100 will be used to refer to any IP network.
HTTP is a known application protocol that provides users with access to files, which can be in different formats, such as text, graphics, images, sound, and video, using a standard page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Among a number of basic document formatting functions, HTML allows software developers to specify graphical pointers on displayed web pages, commonly referred to as xe2x80x9chyperlinks,xe2x80x9d that point to other web pages resident on remote servers. Hyperlinks commonly are displayed as highlighted text or other graphical image on the web page. Selection of a hyperlink with a pointing device, such as a computer mouse, causes the local computer to download the HTML associated with the web page from a remote server. The browser then renders the HTML into the displayed web page.
Web pages accessed over the Internet, whether by a hyperlink, opening directly via an xe2x80x9copenxe2x80x9d button in the browser, or some other means, are commonly downloaded into the volatile cache of a local computer system. In a computer system, for example, the volatile cache is a high-speed buffer that temporarily stores web pages from accessed remote web sites. The volatile cache thus enables a user to quickly review web pages that were already downloaded, thereby eliminating the need to repeat the relatively slow process of traversing the Internet to access previously viewed web pages. This is called local caching.
On the server side, the first web servers were merely HTTP servers that resolved universal resource locators (URLs) by extracting literally from the URL the path to a file that contained the needed page, and transmitting the page back to the browser. Such a server was very simple; it could only be used to access static pages.
A xe2x80x9cstaticxe2x80x9d page is a page which, each time it is requested and served to a requester, has the same byte content. That is, it does not depend upon which requester is requesting the page, when the requester is requesting the page, etc., the byte content of that page remains the same. By contrast, a xe2x80x9cdynamic pagexe2x80x9d is a page which has byte content that may very well change depending upon the particular requester, when the page is being requested, etc. This will be discussed further below.
It is important that web pages be served as quickly as possible, both to reduce the response time to a single user, and to increase the number of users that can be served concurrently. To improve the response time, the Web server uses caches. Web server caches are used to store web page responses in a readily accessible memory location so that when the web page is requested by a user, a previously cached web page response can be retrieved from cache and served quickly to the user.
Heretofore, collaboration on the Internet relied on the use of E-mail. The result has been the creation of a large thread or trail of notes having no home or place. It is a characteristic of such threads that people enter thread at different points and may or may not have ready access to the information required to facilitate collaboration.
In the past, there has been no convenient way to take information off a word processor document and put it on the Internet in one step. To put a document file on the Internet for viewing, a user must establish a web server, load the file into a word processor, save it as HTML, and then find other related files and copy all of the files to the web server, and put them in the correct directory. One solution for this complex procedure is a web folder, that allows a user to upload files to Internet for viewing. Such a web folder presents a web server to the user as if it were a regular file directory, so the user can save the files to this directory. Even in this solution, it is still necessary for the user to establish the web server or obtain permission to use one already created. Further, this approach does not present context of document to the user during the upload process. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a way for a user to create a web site without establishing a web server, and to create a document with pages within that site which yield a context for the document created which is where on the Internet this document appears.
Previously, in a hierarchical database, security could not be increased in subfiles with respect to a parent file. Also, in the past, directory entries or other indicia identifying objects to which a user did not have access were shown, but were greyed out or otherwise managed so that user access was inhibited. There is a need in the art, therefore, for providing for managing access to files in a hierarchical database where security may increase or decrease at a child with respect to its parent, and where indicia identifying objects to which the user does not have access not displayed.
Heretofore, a user can upload a document to a web site through the use of directories and file trees. These may not be intuitive for the user. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a way to upload documents which involves the more intuitive process of dragging and dropping the document to the spot on the site where it is to be rendered.
In accordance with various systems for supporting remote application execution, a Java version of a database engine is configured with a transactional replication feature by which there is brought down from a server to a browser, client data and application logic, or dynamic HTML is downloaded to a browser environment where developers can write a transportable application from scratch. However, these systems, including the transactional replication feature, do not download the security model, and thus are not user filtered in the sense that access control lists, reader filtration, and selective replication are supported at the browser. Security, in such systems, is administered at the server, and not at the browser. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a system and method which enables full replication of server functions at a browser, which may be operating off line from the server, which functions include application code, data, and security.
Previously in web technologies, generation of graphics was done manually. A graphics artist would use Adobe Photoshop or Paintshop Pro, and similar applications, responsive to a specification provided by a requester for a particular graphic, and to generate for it a graphic file, in, for example, a graphics interchange format (.gif). This is a time consuming process, and not dynamic in the sense of generating web sites, etc. A designer needs to lay out the fonts, graphics, etc, and may need to change the character set to make the resulting graphic viewable in other countries or cultures. Consequently, there is a need in art to get graphic artist out of the loop, and make the process dynamic.
Heretofore, a user could not interactively create and modify a web site. The process for creating a web site has been to use the file transfer protocol (FTP) to upload files that define the site. There is a need in the art for a way to enable a user at a browser to create a site, including a place and rooms, and then to create and modify folders and make other structural changes to the site.
Heretofore, templates and wizards have existed for designing the aesthetic characteristics of a web site. However, there has been no way for the aesthetic characteristics of a parent object to be inherited by its children objects.
Heretofore, people can design forms locally using HTML and upload them to their web site. The problem in doing this is that such a form is strictly a layout of fields, and there is no logic that defines where and how the data should be stored. Consequently, there is a need in the art for a server having facility for accepting and storing form data in a page.
Workflow involves having someone fill out a form and submit it on the web. The form then travels to individuals in a prescribed set and order. Typically, for providing workflow on the web, a Domino designer designs a data base containing the form that is used by others having access to that database. There is a need to allow users, not skilled as designers, to create workflow documents from a web browser.
It is an object of the invention to provide a system and method which enables a user to accelerate productivity by easily creating and maintaining collaborative spaces on a network.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method which enables a user to customize security attributes of rooms in a collaborative space including a hierarchy of rooms.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for providing collaborative space for each project of a plurality of individual browser created and managed projects.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for creating collaborative space that is expressive and offers a range of features that allow individuals to express their own personalities, such as through the use of graphics and animations.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for creating collaborative space that is readily accessible to the user, capable of being installed from a web service or from a CD with very little effort.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a teamwork system and method for enabling teams and workers within or between companies to easily set up a common electronic workplace to communicate, share and organize information and documents around any task, project, or initiative.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a team ware system and method which supports small teams that are working together on very project centered or activity oriented things.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for uploading a document without opening it but by selecting and putting the file to a place automatically.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for uploading documents which involve the more intuitive process of dragging and dropping the document to a spot on the site where it is to be rendered.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method including within a web site a context for files allowing a user at a browser to create a new page and determine its location.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for automatically converting a file while dragging the file to a new place.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for drag and drop uploading from a browser to a server of non-HTML files viewable as HTML files and editable as non-HTML files.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for managing security of files in a hierarchical database such that security may increase or decrease at a child with respect to its parent.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for managing a hierarchical database such that indicia only identifying objects to which the user does have access are displayed.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an end user a dynamic system and method for generating graphical displays.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for enabling a user to dynamically create and modify a web site.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for enabling browser creation and modification of web sites.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for enabling uninterrupted online and offline updating of a web site.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method whereby the aesthetic characteristics of a parent room may be inherited by its children rooms.
It is a further object of the invention to provide an offline user a full web site interaction experience.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method whereby a user at a browser may create forms, and incorporate them into a room.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a server system and method for accepting and storing form data in a page.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for enabling a browser to define a work flow document and process.
In accordance with the invention, and system and method is provided for managing workflow from a browser. A server receives from the user browser a form including workflow characteristics, and creates elements for storing state information for tracking the persons who have had and who need to receive the form and in which order; and delivers the form back to the first and other browsers in order.